Outside, Looking In
by psquare
Summary: Adam Milligan is not a Winchester, and he is very grateful for this fact. Post 5.22.


_**A/N:**_ Fic! Out of nowhere! And it's about Adam! Yay!

**Warnings:** SPOILERS for everything aired, really, including 7.23: _Survival of the Fittest_. Second-person, Adam PoV, total weirdness, metaphor-abuse.

**Disclaimer**: I don't own _Supernatural_or any of its characters.

I wrote this while more than slightly drunk. THAT IS MY EXCUSE OKAY.

**_Outside, Looking In_**

_Did you think that they cared?_

Even now, you're not sure. There is something intoxicating about the Winchesters—it's easy to get sucked into their cause, their little universe, their not-so-little problems. _You're blood, family_, Sam said, with as much sincerity as he could muster, and you bought into it for the smallest of moments, because there's a devotion between them that you thought could extend to you, like it was something to be doled out and recycled. The truth is, Sam and Dean don't really care about blood; all they care about is each other. It's the worst kind of love, the kind that wreaks tragedy upon tragedy until there is nothing else left. The kind that starts and ends apocalypses.

Even now, you can't help but wonder what that feels like.

_There is nothing noble or beautiful about their love. It is an ugly, violent thing, and there is no bigger tragedy than you having to pay the price for its existence._

It's a bit rich coming from the archangel that forcibly possessed you to settle a millennia-long feud with his brother, but you don't say anything. Not that it matters—you and Michael are so intertwined that your thoughts instantly become his. There is no keeping secrets. But some human habits die hard.

Like the flinch you still can't suppress when you hear Sam start screaming again.

You haven't seen him for a long time; haven't seen him, in fact, since the glimpse you caught through Michael's eyes (or he through yours, it doesn't matter) just before he pulled you both into the Cage. Michael's kept you cocooned, safe—a cage within a cage, surrounded by nothing but black, hearing only what Michael wants you to hear. At first you thought it was a kind of torture, but by now you've come to appreciate it for the gift it really is. When Michael is angry—and you try to be careful, you do, but sometimes, _sometimes_—he lets in the sounds of a billion souls crying out in agony, screaming, moaning, begging for mercy, and leaves you feeling like you've exploded, fragments of your soul drifting like so much flotsam in a darkness that will never end.

Other times, it's just Sam. Sam's agony is much easier to hear. At first you took a great pleasure in it, then you pitied him, but now—you're just in awe of him.

Sam still screams for Dean.

It's not a cry born out of physical pain—you're pretty sure you can tell the difference by now—but more a desperate prayer, like he's trying not to forget. _Dean, Dean!_ he says. _Dean, I'm here, it's okay, Dean, Dean_—and doesn't _stop_. Just—_Dean, Dean, Dean_ until _Dean_starts sounding less like a name and more like the sound of Sam breathing, or some other vital function. You are torn between disgust and admiration.

_He only remembers Dean because my brother wants him to._

Even so—Sam remembers. That's more than you can ever hope for yourself.

* * *

When Michael's had his fill, he leaves the Cage.

He takes you out with him—you're not sure whether to be grateful or to resent the fact that Michael locked you in there when you both could've been free decades ago.

_The Cage is designed to be a cage for only one being in all of Creation—it is not for me, or you, or even Sam. You could've gotten out anytime you wanted to. Sam can still escape if he so wishes. The question is, does he want to?_

That's a really good question. Another good question is: do you want to burn down the universe for being the stupid, unfair shithole that it is? Because that question's got an equally obvious answer.

Michael doesn't respond. He leaves you alone for the first time in about a century, and you're surprised at the ache you feel in his absence.

For a while there, you think, Michael was starting to feel like family.

* * *

You wander on earth for the next couple of years.

You're not quite dead, but you're definitely not alive, either. A spirit, then, with just enough of Michael's grace still coursing through you that no reaper will dare come near. You lose yourself in this newfound freedom for the first couple of months; the world is a riot of colour and sound and heat. Things slow down a little when you realise that, for all that you're revelling in these new sensations, you hardly remember any of them.

It takes a while to remember the sun burning the back of your neck, or the stinging, slippery cold of snow on bare skin, or the taste of scalding coffee on a busy morning, or the sheer fullness of _being_, of having a trillion little chemical reactions sustain what you call life, while you carry on, oblivious, breathing and talking and laughing and crying. It takes even longer to remember your mother, your friends, your town. The father you never cared for.

You'll never get any of this back, any of it, but you _remember_, and that's enough.

You leave the States soon afterwards; there's a world to see, an eternity of memories to collect. It's when you're sitting submerged in the middle of a coral reef that you think that the Apocalypse was a joke. This world is too big, too beautiful, too much to be destroyed just like that—no, the Apocalypse was a gigantic chess board, the pawns perfectly placed and matched against each other, to give a century's worth of amusement. You wonder if it changes anything that Sam and Dean were nothing more than protagonists in a throwaway cosmic tragedy.

Probably not. Sam and Dean and their horrible, ugly, beautiful love are their own little crystallised universe, and for them, that universe is the only thing worth saving.

* * *

You are drawn back to Sam at some point in the future.

He's in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by headless corpses oozing black blood (smelling neither of Heaven nor Hell, and you are intrigued). He's on his back, staring up at the night sky, blinking lazily. There's a gash on his forehead soaking blood into his hair, a huge chunk of flesh missing from his left shoulder, and the hand that isn't broken is still clutching a knife.

He smiles, however, when you loom over him, and you see his lips move. You lean in closer, and you hear _Dean Dean Dean_, that same litany, unchanged after two centuries of Hell. There is an unspeakable sadness to it all—nothing _will_change for Sam Winchester. He will have eternity with his brother and their ugly, violent love, whether Dean is alive or not.

Sam chokes suddenly, spits out blood, but he doesn't stop his prayer and his bloodstained smile grows.

You place a hand over his chest and the other over his mangled shoulder and tell yourself you're keeping him alive until somebody—Dean, Bobby, anybody—comes after him in the morning.

Nobody does.

Instead, an old trucker stumbles on the massacre, panics, and calls for help. By now, Sam is cold, half his blood is soaked into the ground around him, and his chest is barely moving. But he hasn't slept or even closed his eyes; he's caught in his own mind, still smiling, occasionally mouthing his brother's name.

You watch him being taken away until the ambulance disappears on the horizon; then you turn to once again greet the world.

As things go, you think, it is perhaps a blessing to have been forgotten.

_**Finis**_


End file.
